The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Song Dong China b.1966 Breathing 1996 Performance, 31 December 1996 Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China Courtesy: The artist The pedestal in Public figures disappears in Suh Do-Ho's other works, leaving the tiny figu res to either form a thick mat or support a transparent floor. Occasionally the audience can walk or stand on top of the mat or floor. The artist thus invites the audience to take the place of the missing pedestal and statue - to embody the role of a monument looming over the dominated, and thus to reflect critically upon its monumentality. In this way these works are no longer counter-monuments but anti-monuments. The difference between the two is that a counter-monument subverts traditional monumentality by transforming a conventional monument into something else. Its violation of traditional monumentality is still measured against a conventional monument, and this violation results in a new monumental form (such as the white pedestal in Public figures). An anti-monument, on the other hand, rejects any form of monumental expression and gains its significance from erasing such expression. In China, numerous counter-monuments have been attempted by young experimental artists in the past ten to fifteen years. Many of these projects have taken place along the Great Wall, a prime national monument that symbolises both the country's political identity and its historical heritage. Xu Bing's Ghosts pounding the Wall 1990, for example, started out as a project to make ink rubbings from the Great Wall. When the rubbings are put together in an exhibition, the solid brick-structure is transfigured into its volumeless shadow, and the national monument is transformed into the work of an individual artist. Wang Youshen, on the other hand, covered a section of the Great Wall w ith newspapers. Having worked as a newspaper editor for many years, he knows too well how much the Wall owes its monumentality to propaganda. Wenda Gu's series of monuments of the 'United Nations' which commenced in 1993 is well known . Instead of building monuments with stone or steel, he uses the most ephemeral remains of the human body (hair) to create spectacular 'monuments' for different countries and races. 20 APT2002 Wang Youshen China b.1964 Newspaper advertising 1993 Black-and-white photograph Courtesy: The artist Anti-monuments are fewer, partly because by nature these are works of conceptual art that demand greater radicalism in conceptualisation and design. In addition to Suh Do-Ho's works mentioned above, Song Dong's performance Breathing offers an exceptionally powerful example in this genre. It was New Year's Eve, 1996. Holiday lights outlined the familiar contour of Tiananmen in the distance; the temperature was minus nine degrees Centigrade. Song Dong lay motionless, face down in the deserted Tiananmen Square, breathing onto the cement pavement for forty minutes. A thin layer of ice gradually formed on the ground before his mouth, seemingly increasing in thickness and solidity with each breath. When he left the square, the ice was still shimmering like an elusive islet in an ocean of concrete. It disappeared before the next morning, leaving no visible trace. To be sure, many works in contemporary Chinese avant-garde art have attempted to demystify Tiananmen by blaspheming this most sacred symbol of Communist China. Song Dong, however, departs from the logic of iconoclasm. The meaning of Breathing lies in the artist's desperate effort to inject life into the immense official space where the June Fourth Movement ended in bloodshed in 1989. There is little doubt that Song Dong designed the art project as a tribute to the memory of this failed pro-democratic movement. His performance (and the photograph that documents it) brings us back to that heated month in 1989 when demonstrating students transformed the space in front of Tiananmen into an exhilarating 'living place', and reminds us that whatever the year, 1996 or 2002, the Square still remains an unfeeling, repressive monolith.